The DAI Laboratory and the chair "Agent Technologies in Business Applications and Telecommunications" under the leadership of Prof. Dr.-Ing. Sahin Albayrak focusses on research and development with the goal of developing technologies for the next generation of services and distributed systems. These "Smart Services and Smart Systems" provide a number of novel features that allows them to act autonomously and intelligently.

Research in the DAI Laboratory is being conducted within six different Competence Centers. With this theoretical grounding the DAI Laboratory applies the technologies in different application areas for the development and evaluation of Smart Services. State-of-the-art testbeds allow to validate and demonstrate these services in realistic scenarios. Close cooperations with industry partners ensures here an approach that is both practical and solution oriented. All of this allows the DAI Laboratory to develop technologies within an university environment that meets even the highest industry standards.

The SerCHo project (Service Centric Home), funded by the BMWi, is concerned with the development of a holistic solution, consisting of a "Home Service Platform", a “Service Provider Platform" and an "Ambient Service Framework", providing procedural models and service creation and deployment tools for the support of the service development and the service management. With the help of the SerCHo Framework Services, future services can be designed to be ubiquitously useable and to support users more effectively and efficiently. Examples of such services include communication, maintenance, information, domestic appliance control, security and healthcare services etc.

The Smart Home Energy Assistant project contributes to energy savings not by the improvement of conventional structural characteristics, but rather by the intelligent automated operation of all technical devices in the house such as the heating system or the ventilation. Economical handling of primary energy belongs at present to the topics which are most emphatically discussed.

At the Université Catholique de Louvain Prof. Jean Vanderdonckt is working with his research group on the design of UsiXML (which stands for USer Interface eXtensible Markup Language). UsiXML is a XML-compliant markup language that describes the UI for multiple contexts of use such as Character User Interfaces (CUIs), Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), Auditory User Interfaces, and Multimodal User Interfaces.

At the HIIS Laboratory Prof. Fabio Paterno and his group investigate in research areas concerning Methods and Tools for the Analysis, Design and Development of Interactive Applications, Intelligent Interfaces, Interfaces for Ubiquitous Applications, MultiModal Interfaces, Accessibility, Usability Engineering and Models for HCI.

A nice introduction to Models and MDA Terms can be found at geekswithblogs.net/cyoung/archive/2009/01/05/128369.aspx